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By means of car2x communication technologies (car2x) driver warnings can be presented to drivers quite early. However, due to their early timing they could be misunderstood by drivers, distract or even disturb them. These problems arise if, at the moment of the warning, the safety–critical situation is not yet perceivable or critical. In order to examine, when drivers want to receive early warnings as a function of the situation criticality, a driving simulator study was conducted using the two early warning stages of a multi stage collision warning system (first stage: informing the driver; second stage: prewarning the driver). The optimum timing to activate these two early warning stages was derived by examining the drivers’ evaluation of these timings concerning their appropriateness and usefulness. As situational variation, drivers traveling at about 100 km/h were confronted with slow moving traffic either driving at 25 km/h or 50 km/h at the end of a rural road. In total, 24 participants were tested in a within-subjects design (12 female, 12 male; M = 26.6 years, SD = 7.2 years). For both stages, drivers preferred an earlier timing when approaching slow moving traffic traveling at 25 km/h (first stage: 447 m, second stage: 249 m ahead of the lead vehicle) compared to 50 km/h (first stage: 338 m, second stage: 186 m ahead of the lead vehicle). The drivers’ usefulness rating also varied with the timing, spanning a range of 8 s for driver-accepted timing variations and showed correspondence to the drivers’ appropriateness ratings. Based on these results and those of a previous study, a timing function for each of the two early warning stages depending on the speed difference between the safety–critical object and the host vehicle is presented. Indirectly, similar adaptations are already implemented in current collision warning systems, which use the time-to-collision to give drivers acute warnings in a later stage, when an immediate reaction of the driver may still prevent a collision. However, this study showed that drivers also favor this kind of adaptation for earlier warning stages (information and prewarning). Thus, adapting the timing according to the drivers’ preferences will contribute to a better acceptance of these collision warning systems.

Driving sleepiness is a serious problem worldwide. It is of interest to develop reliable sleepiness detection systems to implement in vehicles, and for such a system both physi-ological data and driver performance data can be used. The reasons for driver sleepiness can be many, where an interesting factor to consider is the light condition of the environment, specifically daylight and darkness. Daylight and darkness has shown to affect human sleepiness in general and it is therefore of importance to investigate the effect of it on driver sleepiness independent of other factors. This thesis aimed to investigate whether light condition is a parameter that should be considered when developing a sleepiness detection system in a vehicle. This was done by investigating if the course of sleepiness would be affected by daylight and darkness, and if adding light condition information as a parameter to a classification model improved the performance of the sleepiness classification. To achieve this, the study was based upon data collected from driving simulator tests conducted by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI). Test subjects drove in simulated daylight and darkness during both daytime while rested and nighttime while sleep-deprived. An exploratory and statistical analysis was conducted of several sleepiness indicators extracted from physio-logical data and simulator data. Three different classification models were implemented. The indicators pointed to a higher level of driver sleepiness during night compared to during day, as well as an increase with time on task. However, no clear trends pointed to daylight and darkness having affected the sleepiness of the driver. The classification models showed a marginal improvement when including light condition as a feature, however not large enough to draw any specific conclusion regarding the effect. The conclusion was that an effect of daylight and darkness on the course of driver sleepiness could not be seen in this thesis. The adding of light and dark as a feature did not significantly improve the classification models’ performances. In summary, further investigations of the effect of daylight and darkness in relation to driver sleepiness are needed.